Council Post: Dear Agency Friends, We Are Not Product Companies

All of us in the industry are familiar with that lovely Friday email that reminds us to fill out our timesheets. Billable time is how we make money, much like a law firm. We don’t have the muscle memory to understand that product design, launch and maintenance don’t vibrate on the same wavelength as consulting. Products are living things that need to be supported. Sure, we build products for our clients as agency consultants.

Instead, I've found clients are asking for help identifying areas of opportunity where technology will impact their business or open them up for risk. Most of the time, our job is to analyze a wide range of software development companies to then recommend integration with existing software. This is why advisory services typically include experts in technology, data science and creative services.

How often are clients requesting a tool that we built as an out-of-the-box solution that has service-level agreements and 24/7 customer support ? Answer: not often. The other request from clients, which is near and dear to my heart, is the traditional “making process,” wherein clients ask us to experiment and prototype new technologies on their existing infrastructure . Or maybe they want to look at a new product lifecycle to understand how things like AI can impact user experience, content generation or internal operations.

I’m not saying that every instance of homegrown agency software is a waste of money, and frankly, I have used some great internally built tools at places like R/GA and Havas, but I have seen that they fall apart when they think that everyone wants a tool that was built with a very specific use case for a very specific set of users. Additionally, I have found that many potential “buyers” of the software were other agencies.

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